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I was disappointed in ArmA after a few months with it (mostly because hopping online wasn't that fun if you didn't know the other people). I hope they really fix the AI and bugs that have persisted since OFP.

I was disappointed in ArmA after a few months with it (mostly because hopping online wasn't that fun if you didn't know the other people).

That's why I haven't rushed into these games. Sounds awesome to me with the bullet drop and realism or whatever, but if I do any multiplayer it has to be as little long-term commitment as possible. Maybe I'll jump in OFP through Gametap...

Eduardo X, perhaps the word i was searching wasn't quality. Yep, Operation Flashpoint wasn't the most polished game ever, i can remember some horrible bugs. But still it was an excellent game, so i hope ArmA 2 will be like Ofp.

Warfare in the 1.14 patch is what kept this going for me and a few friends with our co-op sessions. Basically it just lets you fire it up and not quit whatever you feel like doing until you win the war. Some of the best moments had me on the ground with a Humvee and my friend in an Apache helicopter taking a city back from the AI invaders.

Here's hoping ArmA2 is good, and BI gets their 1.15 patch out and it includes a fix for ArmA 1 in Vista 64 when you have more than 4 gig of RAM

If you know people to play with (I do) then OFP and ArmA are the best online first person shooters by a mile. If you don't then you're not really out of luck, things just won't be as fun on pubbie servers.

I'm not terribly excited about ArmA 2, it looks like more of a slightly altered reiteration of ArmA. Hopefully the SP campaign this time around is better and the multiplayer is more streamlined. It'd also be nice if they released the mod tools at the same time as the game. A man can dream.

As a single player gamer, Operation Flashpoint is one of my most frustrating gaming experiences ever. The game is right up my alley, genre and concept wise, and I wanted desperately to like it. I can see how the game has its merits as a co-op or multiplayer game, but the single player campaign was an outright nightmare. I even bought the expansion packs and the GOTY edition, but I always end up uninstalling it after half an hour, frustrated and sad. When reviewers more or less unanimously described ArmA1 as "OFP 1.5" I avoided it entirely, mostly out of fear for my mental health.

I appreciate Bohemia Interactive's steadfast loyalty to their original concept and stubborn refusal to turn it into yet another arcade shooter. But I'm left with the impression that it's a game where nobody on the development team really stopped, took a step back and then brutally culled the game for the sake of playability, but rather tweaked, modified and added whatever necessary to keep all the original ideas in the game at all costs.

An ArmA game that actually works in single player? I'd sell my parents to the glue factory for that.

Operation Flashpoint campaign was much better than ArmA campaign. The mission variety, the length, the little cutscenes, the dialogue between soldiers, the overall narrative, etc.

That said, in ArmA there was a little new feature (a bit hidden) that improved the game a lot. Customizable AI level!. In Operation Flashpoint you could only toggle some realism options, in ArmA (and i suppose also in ArmA 2) you can toggle the same options and also raise or descrease the AI level, and with different settings for AI smartness and AI accuracy.
So you can lower the AI level to more manegable levels (and dont have to repeat 30 times a level), and specifically only lower the goddaamn too accurate AI accuracy.
In ArmA you also can save always, in the same slot, without having to use cheats like in Ofp, where you could only save one time in one slot.

ArmA flaws were a very bland campaign, high requisites, and bugs aplenty (even by Ofp standards!). If they fix these three flaws in ArmA 2, i will be happy.

Opf 2 is... in the air. We still don't know anything. It may be good, or may not.
And i fear Codemasters will dumb down the original formula.

The trick is to dumb down the interface (i.e. make it, well, not fucked up) without dumbing down the game as such.

I dunno. I have nothing to substantiate it, but my gut feeling is that Codemasters don't quite understand the genre. It will be pretty for sure, but I'm worried they'll make the wrong design decisions for the wrong reasons.

I played through the single player campaigns of both Flashpoint and AA and I still don't really know what I'm being told when I hear a radio message, or indeed sometimes even whether I am being spoken to, or speaking myself...

Here is how to make ArmA 2 (and OF 2, also) better, in my opinion. Some of these will make it more mainstream, some will make it more fun.

1. Work on your animations. Right now people kind of glide around like pop up (actually, pop down) targets. Most engagements in ArmA work like this . . . you get a bead on the enemy, you shoot one of them, or you miss, and the rest drop to the ground and start doing this jerky wooden crawl thing. Study a whole bunch of shooters ... namely most other shooters, on how animations and enemy AI work. Far Cry 2 does this really well. The Battlefield: BC game does it well. The Call of Duty series. You are not trying to be those games, but pay attention to how they make enemies move around. You can even, if the AI doesn't know exactly where the shot came from, have them move to the WRONG side of cover. How fun would that be? Change some death animations. Right now it feels like shooting wooden dolls with pre scripted animations. Your animations for your player models need work too. The arms and gun are way too wooden. Gun sway does not make a player seem alive.

2. Make your guns way, way beefier. I think your models are not bad, but you need work animating them/making them fire. Give some beefy sounds to the guns, not little sounds. Make bullets zipping by sound like bullets zipping by, not someone tapping a pen on a desk in the next room. When you open up with a SAW make bullet casings fly out and the flash obscure your shot. Make the iron sights awesome and fast. See many games that do this right, but especially Call of Duty 4. This is essential.

3. Physics . . . need work. Basically in ArmA, which is great, the physics do not match the gameplay. You have lots of explosions but no effects of these explosions. Some of this is graphics, like collapsing walls/buildings sinking into the ground. The way to do that nowadays is with a huge puff of dust and debris while fake chunks fly out and the model is gone. See many examples. Also, when vehicles explode its not very satisfying when you get a hit and then two seconds later it blows up in place. We need some dynamic and quick feedback there. Knock stuff over. Have parts flying out and zipping by, even if they can't hurt us or anything else. Have them burn afterward. Also, we need better bullethole/bullet damage decals and models. We like to tear shit up. Right now it feels like I'm firing a bb gun with a laser on it. Pip pip pip <> BAM BAM BAM BBBOOOOOOOOOM. You don't even need tracers IMO but just lots of puffs of smoke at impact. And shards of stuff flying around. If you want to put tracer in fine, but work on their look. They look like the tracers from Combat Mission right now.

4. Interface. Drop the early 90s flight sim interface and go with something more modern, like a radial menu or context sensitive interface. Your interface in ArmA with the pointing to a "move here" or "attack here" is a step in the right direction, but you need artifical (and less realistic) on screen confirmation. You need to gamey stuff that other games use like floating arrows and stuff. That looks unrealistic, but it goes a long way interface wise. Also, the overhead map needs work. You need to be able to select all of your assets and see them at all time with different icons. An M1A1 tank needs its own icon, an infantry his own icon, a BMP its own icon. Hopefully a little more clear than they are now. Think bold lines with filled in color, not all green circle shapes. It kind of works now but it's unclear sometimes. You also need to be able to select and give orders using hopefully that same interface on the overhead map. Yes, a little more unrealistic but soooo much easier. While you're at it the text to speech or whatever stuttering thing you use now needs to be scrapped. Hire some voice actors to do whole lines and use them with feeling. The parsing tech you are working now sounds really weird. You can even say stuff like "Move out!" or "Defend this position, soldier!". The main interface thing is to make it simpler, so you're not hunting down keys and lists in the heat of battle.

That's my $.02. Some will disagree but I'd play the hell out of that game.

I suspect you need to take out #2 before the purists come howling :P Then again, I recall dslyecxi made a bullet whizzing sound mod because what was already there "wasn't accurate enough".

What the game needs, AI-wise, is opponents that aren't realistically hard and friendlies that ARE. The rest is dressing, for single-player anyway. Multiplayer ... well, as usual with these games I just don't think it's possible to make it casual-friendly enough without ruining what makes it special. Dropping in on a random HUGE mission, BF2-like, just wouldn't work here.

Mmm... i am not liking it a lot. Obviously there is a loss of quality between the first "target-render"/pseudo-screnshots seen and this, but even forgetting that...
The lightning is spectacular but a bit fake, the screenshoots reeks of postprocess, real time or otherwise (too much constrast and saturation). And the grass is horrible!

It still could be a great game, of course. Who knows how much (or how little) consolized will be the game.